A lot of slowdowns recently

[caravel]

I have 4mb broadband, hardly dial-up.

Some crazy stuff is going on here.

I agree. No matter what connection people have, the .org wouldn't be that slow even if you were using 56k dial-up. I gave up earlier, after waiting 5 minutes for every thread to load, and logged out (which took long enough in itself).

The Tavern is not vital, but shouldn't be closed because it is something important to the community. Also, as I've said before, it's not the Tavern that causes all the slowdowns, when I was on earlier, and the forum was very slow, there were about six people viewing the tavern and up to about seven each viewing the others. The RTW mods forum had about 19 people viewing it however. All of the requests are going to the same database, so it doesn't matter which forum people are viewing. The problem seems to be the number of connections and the server being unable to cope.

-Edit: Just checked and there were 23 viewing the RTW Mods forum, and 43 on the Hosted Mods, and now it's responsive and not slowing down at all.

The problem could be the that the actual server that the org is located on is also hosting other high traffic websites. I've encountered this before on another board a few years ago, and it had the same lag problems as the org.